


like sleep to the freezing

by impossiblewanderings



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Fix-It of Sorts, Homeless!Rumple, Rumbelle AU - Freeform, Rumbelle Secret Santa 2014, Spinner!Rumple, not entirely sure if I fixed it, or made it worse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 10:58:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2809817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impossiblewanderings/pseuds/impossiblewanderings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In his sweet dream she nurses Bae back to health, and Rum never knows the horror of standing in a castle aflame with a white-hot dagger branding his palm, of screaming and writhing in the forest loam as the transformation overcomes him, of being tricked by a thing far older and wiser and more agonised than he wearing the guise of a tinker, and emerging from the woods in the frosty morning changed forever, with the power to save his son earned thrice over, in fire and madness and blood.</p>
<p>The dream is a sweet, sweet lie, and Gold will happily dream it forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like sleep to the freezing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [likehandlingroses](https://archiveofourown.org/users/likehandlingroses/gifts).



_She has forgotten him_. Gold flinches from the light of café doors, shuffles one careful foot after another in the drifts of snow. New York is lurching towards Christmas in a drunken swirl of fairy lights and late night shopping, the taxi cabs endlessly circling as though they are all caught in the eye of a storm. _It has been more than two years since he saw her_. Even the thought of that makes Gold shake his head, like a wounded beast before the wolf pack’s mad yellow eyes. There are days when he cannot even remember what she looks like, and others when the mere thought of her name sends a great toll of grief shuddering through his chest and limbs, until he can’t breathe.The wind is sharp and bitter, tearing through the thin material of his ragged suit jacket, the only thing he has left of his life in Storybrooke. It blows cold and merciless with the promise of snow caught in its teeth, and it will travel all the way up the coast to Maine tonight, until it touches the headstone of his son.

Gold finds himself leaning against the brick of a Starbucks, and the smell of coffee erodes his resolve to keep his face to the aching wind, and blunt the edges of his poisoned thoughts. There is the low comfortable rumble of conversation coming from inside, punctuated with gusts of laughter. Here, in all probability, the Christmas spirit is flowing hard and fast enough to earn him a free drink, and perhaps some food to go with it, if not from the patrons then one of the staff. He limps to the door, but as he drags it open, the smell of pastries and the dark warmth of the place crash over him like a wave. Over the speakers there is a man singing, with longing in his soft Irish voice, _oh but she loves like sleep to the freezing, sweet and right and merciful, I’m all but washed in the tide of her breathing,_ and he stumbles backwards and lets the heavy glass swing to. It is all too much, it is always too much at this time of year, her favourite time of year, and _his,_ where he sleeps under the frozen earth. Gold cannot bear it, and walks stiffly on, his bad leg hanging like a dead weight at his side.

* * *

 

“Papa, are the torches lit?”

Rumplestiltskin turns from the window and tries to smile at his boy. Baelfire’s cheeks are flushed, bringing a hectic spot of colour and warmth to his gaunt cheeks that could be mistaken for good health, if you could not see how pale he is beneath it. Bae coughs wetly, trying to muffle it in his shirtsleeve. Rum finds that he cannot look away from the dark stain that spreads over the fabric, the herald of his son’s death. Bae looks up at him expectantly, his eyes shining in the candlelight.

“Yes, Bae, they’ve put out the torches.”

“How does it look?” His son demands, with a clear yearning in his voice. He loves this season, one of feasting and goodwill and brave torchlight holding back the darkness. Rum knows it only as a season of sickness, blizzards and death, for stock and people alike. But for Bae’s sake, he glances back out at the dancing torches, hissing and sizzling as the snowflakes hit them, and pretends.

“It looks beautiful.”

* * *

 

Gold’s feet take him towards Central Park. It is far too late at night for a stroll there, but he is feeling miserable and reckless, and he ignores the instinct that warns him away from the darkness under the trees. He was all darkness once, a thing of shadows and the holes between the stars, and it does not frighten him. Usually at this time he would be back in his den, a wretched thing of cardboard and newspaper, in a relatively dry corner of what is hotly disputed territory amongst the homeless population of New York. It had taken him six months of turf wars, arguments, deals and once a bloody confrontation, to win himself that patch of earth, and if he does not return then someone else could move in. They live like alley cats, forever squabbling over damp concrete and overflowing dumpsters. It disgusts him, but he has nowhere else to go. And he cannot seem to bring himself to care lately. Let them fight over it, and much good it do them. He leaves footprints in the muddied snow, all grey and sullied by thousands of pedestrians, as he limps on.

_Two years_. The thought dogs his footsteps, pushes him onwards to outrun it, drags him down like a chain. Two years since she turned her face and her heart from him and his mistakes. Two years since he held Baelfire in his arms and felt the last breath go out of his boy, his little boy, his only son. _Two years_.

The path sweeps onward under the silent trees, patiently bearing their loads of snow. The footpath has been swept, but it is still icy, and every dozen steps either his cane or his bad leg slip, and all the muscles in his back and arms ache with the effort of saving himself from a nasty fall. Sometimes, he feels so very tired of saving himself. A couple pass, draped in dark coats against the bitter weather. She laughs and whispers to her partner, her lips huffing a white cloud into the bitter air. He murmurs something in response. Neither look at the homeless man in the old suit jacket and shaking hands leaning on his cane. They’ve learned by now that to make eye contact with one of the city’s undesirables always causes trouble. So they do not see how they affect him, so warm and joyful in their affection, rushing through the park towards the brightly-lit streets, with her brown curls floating behind her. They do not see the stricken look on his face, how he gropes for the back of a park bench to help him stand. She is not Belle, but the shock of her, the closeness, the perfume of her hair, drains his strength on this night of ghosts. Gold sits on the cold bench, tries to stop his heart banging so painfully against his ribs. It dawns on him that perhaps, if she did come back someday, the sight of her alone could kill him.

* * *

 

Rum wakes to find himself and Baelfire snowed in the next morning. The snowstorm has turned into a blizzard, with cruel winds moaning and nudging about the eaves of their little cottage. Rum is trapped with only his son and his son’s cough for company, a grating, hoarse bark that sets his nerves afire. It sounds as though it is shredding Bae’s insides with each round; little wonder he brings up so much blood. Rum treats it with herbs stewed in hot tea, with a thin soup made from the juices of a haunch of venison he begged from the butcher in a little bowl, and a few drops of their precious jar of honey. Such simple remedies, and they will not save him. Bae needs the services of an apothecary, or a travelling healer, but Rum is the town coward, and he has bitterly discovered that no one in his village will so much as turn their head for the pleas of a desperate father for his dying son.

Bae gasps for breath, and goes into another round of coughing. He chokes on the blood in his throat at the end of it, and Rum brings him a handkerchief to spit it into.

“Thank you, Papa.” Bae smiles, and then settles restlessly into his bed. He used to be able to get up and walk a little, with Rum’s help, but now he cannot rise at all. In the space of a few short weeks, Rum’s world has shrunk to these four walls, nursing his son with his crude, inadequate doctoring during the day, and spinning relentlessly at night. They must have money with which to treat Bae’s illness, and despite his infamy, Rum is the best spinner in the village. He thinks desperate thoughts, in the black pit that is the deepest part of the night, as the spinning wheel turns and turns. Once, there comes into his head the image of tenderly lifting the pillow from under Bae’s sleeping head, and settling it, gently but firmly, over his son’s face, and pressing hard, in the last and only merciful act that his father will be able to give him, and he struggled with the latch and ran out into the snow so that Bae would not wake to hear him retching and weeping in the darkness.

“Are the torches still lit?” Bae asks hoarsely, his eyes fluttering shut in his tiredness. Rum blinks away his thoughts, and looks out the window in time to see the last torch snuffed out in the gale, red and yellow sparks whipping away to be swallowed in the snow.

“Yes.” Rum lies, and goes wearily to the spinning wheel.

* * *

 

Gold is shivering alone on his park bench, the sort of shivering that makes his teeth chatter and his arms and legs spasm against the cold, shivering that is his body giving him a warning that it cannot take much more of this. He must stand and walk back to his den, if he wishes to be warm again, if he wants to live to see the winter sun rising over the trees red and swollen as a ripe fruit. And he does move to stand, but his legs will not obey him. So he curls up instead, turns his fall into a bed on the hard wooden slats, with his gloved hand under his head for a pillow, and his cane quiet beside him. He sighs, once, then ducks his head beneath the collar of his jacket, and reaches for sleep.

* * *

 

Three days into the blizzard, and Rum wakes with a start, with a growing incredulity of his own stupidity. _The fairies_. They are unaffected by the weather, and even in midwinter they come to sing to the frozen foxgloves and bluebells that shelter under the logs and bushes in the forest, to remind the little flowers of spring. There is even a fairy ring a little way off the trail that runs behind Rum’s cottage, where he has taken Bae to see them dance in the summer evenings, and to hear their laughter like the tinkle of tiny bells. He will go and beg the fairies for their assistance; praise their beauty and offer them his services, and in their thoughtless, proud vanity, surely at least one will answer his call. He rugs up warmly, and takes his heaviest stick from beside the fireplace. He has banked the fire to ensure it burns low and steady all the night through for Bae, and his son does not wake as the door creaks shut behind him.

In the blinding whiteness, Rum makes his way mostly by memory and touch, with his stout stick as useful for his weak leg as it is to probe the path ahead. By great good luck, he finds the right trail, and follows it to where the ring lies, untouched by snow, ringed by toadstools bright as spilled blood, and he pleads his case to the empty, snow-filled wind.

Rum waits until dawn by the fairy ring, half-frozen, lips and tongue so numb they can scarcely form words, his hands buried in his ribs for warmth. No fairies come, though he knows that they are listening. There is an awareness about the glade, and when he turns his ear to the wind, once he thinks he hears a peal of silvery laughter.

But they do not come out, and his praises turn to ash on his tongue. The knowledge that he has left his son alone for nothing drops a boiling stone of fear and hatred into his chest, and he curses the faithless creatures, spits on their circle and smashes the toadstools with unsteady hands, heinous acts that will earn him lifelong enmity. Rum does not care, and trudges home in ever deepening snowdrifts, his rage spent.

He meets a tinker, and helps him pull his cart out of where it has lain half-buried in the snow. The tinker is old, with pale eyes crinkled at the corners and a rueful smile. He seems to guess part of Rum’s story.

“If I lose him,” Rum tells the man, his voice ruined by his screaming and his begging and his cursing into a ragged whisper, “then I will truly, truly become dust.”

The tinker nods his head in sympathy.

“There’s another way.” He says gruffly, and spits onto the ground.

“Another way to what?” Rum asks, defeated, exhausted, dragging his feet back down the path to his home.

“Another way what’s not fairies.” The tinker elaborates unhelpfully, but something in his manner makes Rum pause.

“What is it?”

* * *

 

“Sir? Sir, you need to wake up.”

Gold starts awake, flinching from the beam of a torch shone into his eyes.

“We don’t allow vagrancy, or sleeping on the park benches.” One of the policemen says, and waits for Gold to push himself unsteadily to his feet.

“Yes, sorry officer.” Gold offers, oddly breathless, but no longer shivering, at least. He feels warm all through, miraculously, but his head spins and he cannot walk well.

“Drunk …” He hears the mutter behind him, and doesn’t stop to dispute it. He has learned over the past few years that the police force is no friend of his, and never will be.

“… looks … almost _dapper_ …”

They chuckle lowly together at the misplaced dignity this poor man clings to as he stumbles ahead of them out of the park, his suit jacket ripped but well-tailored, like a tramp on his way to the theatre.

They follow him with measured strides all the way back onto the streets, but Gold’s head is spinning, and as soon as they turn away back to their beat he finds the first alleyway he can and sinks back to the ground. It is dirty and dank, but he is warm still, and he is not so dizzy on the ground. There is no cardboard or newspaper to soak up the cold and the wet, but the journey to his den seems, at the moment, an impossible one. He craves sleep now, as he craves warmth and food, as he once craved love, and so long ago it seems, power. The warmth is spreading all through his head and chest as he brings his damaged leg close to his chest with the other, shuts his eyes, and dreams.

* * *

 

The dream is so much sweeter than the ugly reality of what really happened, so long ago.

In Gold’s dream, when Rum trudges home to the door of his cottage, and must lean a moment against it, to gather his strength and his love for the boy that waits on the other side, he looks up to see a party of horsemen gallop into the village. There are soldiers, warmly dressed in long cloaks over their chainmail, and in their midst she is bright as a butterfly against their cold steel. Their horses are exhausted, travelling in the deep snow, and they will not make it back to the castle until tomorrow, but must shelter in the village overnight.

In the dream, she turns with her curls crowned with snowflakes, and Rum sees the pattern of the Royal Healers stitched into her robe. He runs to her, despite his bad leg, and collapses at her feet.

“Please,” he gasps, not worthy to even touch her boots, but with a pain and a love within him that threaten to tear him apart.

“Please, my lady …”

One of the soldiers goes to kick him away, with a curse of ‘Hobblefoot’, by which he is known in the village, but she stays his hand.

“My son,” Rum says, and grasps the end of her cloak with his fingers red and stiff from the frost. “My son is sick. He needs a healer, oh please, _please_ …”

Gold knows that his Belle was never a healer, that she was a princess caught up in a terrible war, who gathered up her courage and gave her freedom and her heart into the care of a wretched, unworthy beast.

But in the dream, she turns to her companions and says, furiously, with her blue eyes flashing, “I don’t care who he is, I don’t care if he is the town coward. I wouldn’t care if he was an ogre himself, his son is ill and I am a healer! I will go to him.”

“But my lady,” One soldier protests, giving Rum a look of pure disgust.

But she is adamant, and in his sweet dream she nurses Bae back to health, and Rum never knows the horror of standing in a castle aflame with a white-hot dagger branding his palm, of screaming and writhing in the forest loam as the transformation overcomes him, of being tricked by a thing far older and wiser and more agonised than he wearing the guise of a tinker, and emerging from the woods in the frosty morning changed forever, with the power to save his son earned thrice over, in fire and madness and blood.

The dream is a sweet, sweet lie, and Gold will happily dream it forever.

* * *

 

He wakes in the back seat of a car, with his head on someone’s lap. He is wreathed in blankets, and his heart beats awkwardly, unevenly in his chest.

“Where ‘m I?” Gold slurs badly, unable to focus on anything but the wavering ridge of the car roof.

“You’ve got hypothermia. We’re taking you to hospital.”

Gold would recognise those clipped, angry tones she uses to hide her concern anywhere.

“Emma.” He smirks at the ceiling.

“Yeah.” She grunts from the driver’s seat. He can see the ripple of her gold hair shivering like a waterfall under the streetlights. It makes him sick to look at after a while and he closes his throbbing eyes.

“Rumple?” The whimper is so tiny he barely catches it, but his heavy eyes spring open, and he turns his head on the jolting seat to her face. It is her lap he lays his head on, and it is her fingers stroking his filthy, unwashed hair, and it is her eyes, her beautiful eyes and no other, glimmering with unshed tears.

“Some major magical shit went down with Arendelle.” Emma supplies gruffly from the front seat. “The portal was open too long and Storybrooke shifted to their time difference, or something. I don’t really understand. It was only two months inside, we didn’t realise …”

She breaks off as Belle leans forward, her tears like tiny blessings on his upturned face.

“I would never have left you so long without a _word,_ Rumple! Believe me, I wanted to punish you, I wanted you to … to learn a lesson, but I would never have …. The anniversary of Neal’s death, _two years_ , I …. I’m so _sorry_ …”

She understands, as she always has, as she always will, and he reaches up to touch her face, but doesn’t have the strength. For a moment, his fingers waver in the gulf between them, and begin to fall, but she catches him as she always does, clutching them in both hands, and brings them to her wet cheek.

“Belle.” He sighs, a prayer, a promise and a plea in one perfect word. She is better than any dream, and to have her real and breathing beside him is enough.

He sleeps then, and does not dream again. The lonely spinner and his son in their cottage in the snow are far, far away, while her hand is in his, his thumb just touching the blue vein of her wrist, mapping out the beats of her living heart.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2014 Rumbelle Secret Santa, for likehandlingroses. Prompt: Spinner!Rumple, fairy circles, dapper.   
> Song lyrics quoted from 'Cherry Wine' by Hozier.


End file.
